Dutch universities have made a big step in their effort to make research results publicly accessible (Open Access). Authors are thought to be more ‘visible’ if their work is freely available on the Internet, and they will have a wider audience than if they publish in the traditional journals only. The greatly increased cost of subscriptions to the traditional journals means that university libraries can afford fewer and fewer of them.
The VNSU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands) announced an agreement with the Berlin-based Springer Group, the world's second-largest science publisher, that all articles which are published by Dutch university researchers are made publicly accessible. This agreement runs initially up to 2011. With Elsevier, the VNSU has agreed to start a pilot to examine how open access can be broadened further.
These are remarkable steps indeed because the rules of the “open access game” are changing a bit. In this model authors will be able to publish open access without paying those pesky page charges (not a trivial amount of money...). I imagine that in this model the universities will probably pay a huge flat fee. In order to fully bypass the traditional publishers one would have to transfer funds destined to pay for journal subscriptions into “publication funds” and have scientists pay for their own open access publications. Having a limited publication fund sounds horrible but on a bright side it might counter the wide spread “least publishable unit” (LPU) syndrome.
The VNSU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands) announced an agreement with the Berlin-based Springer Group, the world's second-largest science publisher, that all articles which are published by Dutch university researchers are made publicly accessible. This agreement runs initially up to 2011. With Elsevier, the VNSU has agreed to start a pilot to examine how open access can be broadened further.
These are remarkable steps indeed because the rules of the “open access game” are changing a bit. In this model authors will be able to publish open access without paying those pesky page charges (not a trivial amount of money...). I imagine that in this model the universities will probably pay a huge flat fee. In order to fully bypass the traditional publishers one would have to transfer funds destined to pay for journal subscriptions into “publication funds” and have scientists pay for their own open access publications. Having a limited publication fund sounds horrible but on a bright side it might counter the wide spread “least publishable unit” (LPU) syndrome.
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